Remember guests' author names and colours between sessions

[jimj316]

---

name: Feature request
about: Suggest an idea for this project
title: ''
labels: enhancement
assignees:

---

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I have a small Etherpad-Lite instance set up for planning projects and events with friends. I don't want to force them to have accounts (as this would raise a big barrier to entry and would make it hard to collaborate with large groups). I like how I can see authors' names, but these names are forgotten (they become "false") whenever they close and re-open the tab. Users often don't notice that this has happened, so quickly everyone's names are "false" which undermines the utility of this feature.

Describe the solution you'd like
I am aware of the fact that user settings (e.g. setting the theme) are stored in a cookie, so I would suggest storing the author name and colour in there as well.

Describe alternatives you've considered
I'm not sure there really are any alternative solutions beyond ignoring the problem.

Additional context
None

Plugin?
I've tried looking for a plugin to solve this issue but I couldn't find one, which I was a little surprised by. I also don't really know how Etherpad plugins work or whether they can store data in the session cookie.

[SamTV12345]

Hmm. Can you ellaborate how they become false. If I go to https://yopad.eu/p/test, enter any username and send a message via chat and reload the tab I am still the said username or am I missing something. This sounds really like an improvement if I can replicate the behavior

[jimj316]

That's weird, I'm not experiencing the issue on that test server, so I suppose it's either a bug, functionality in a later version of Etherpad, or a problem with a plugin.

The steps I'm doing to replicate the issue on my server is:

• Open the pad
• Set the username & colour on the top right
• Make no changes to anything else
• Close the tab
• Re-open the tab, the username is now "null".

My server is on version 1.9.4, although I see now that the newest version is 1.9.7. I'll see if I can update it tonight to see if that helps. I can also send you (or anyone else) a link to my instance if it helps with testing.

[dcht00]

@jimj316 I used to have this problem, was solved by #5401 ? Had to change a value in settings.json